The increase in electronic commerce over the Internet has resulted in a growing demand for websites to track their online customers' behavior and activity while at their sites. Tracking this activity enables the website to better understand their customers, which provides insight into ways in which the websites' service and/or offerings can be improved. Websites can track their information on their own, but larger sites enlist the aid of third party application software or a third party application service provider (“ASP”) to do the work for them.
Client websites place great value on the ability of an ASP, for instance, to report on overall website metrics, such as revenue or cartings (i.e., the action of a visitor placing a product in a cart), and on what is driving the metrics on the client's website. Current ASP systems attribute overall website metrics to specific navigation entities, like hyperlinks, pages and sections (i.e., collections of pages pertaining to a specific grouping of products, like “sports equipment” or “laptop accessories”), which enables clients to gain an understanding of which navigation entities have significant impact on those metrics. However, in order for ASPs to break down the overall metrics according to navigation entity, the ASP requires knowledge of the mapping of the metrics to the navigation entities prior to attribution taking place.
To implement this attribution methodology, an ASP system may require, as an initial setup matter, a client web site map that details which navigation entity will receive attribution of which metric prior to the system being run. For example, if a client web site showcases a specific digital video disc (“DVD”) on its home page, there may be an entry in the corresponding web site map specifying that revenue resulting from the purchase of that DVD be attributed to the home page, thereby crediting the home page for directing the visitor to the DVD purchase. When the ASP sees that a visitor bought the DVD, the ASP system consults the map and attributes the corresponding revenue to the home page.
A major drawback to this mapping process is that there is an up front effort required to initially map all relevant metrics to their corresponding navigation entities. Additionally, if the client web site makes any changes to a mapped navigation entity on its site, the map held in the ASP system must be updated to reflect those changes in order for the metrics to be properly attributed to the changed navigation entities. This increases the client's ongoing effort to maintain the ASP system.
Some ASPs may eliminate the need for the web site map by requiring attribution information to be provided on each relevant web page, and to be carried forward (e.g., via session variables or query strings in the uniform resource locator (“URL”)) through a visitor's navigation path during a session. For example, if a client web site showcases a specific DVD on its home page, attribution information on the home page (such as “apply revenue to home page”) may follow the visitor through to check out. Thus, if a visitor ends up buying the DVD, the ASP system will see the carried through attribution information when the visitor pays for the DVD, and know to attribute that revenue to the home page.
However, every time a change is made to a navigation entity under this approach, client effort is still required to change the attribution information that is held on that navigation entity and to be carried forward during a session.
Accordingly, there is a need in the art for a low-maintenance system and method for enabling attribution without additional client effort when a navigation entity is added, removed or changed.